The interpreter's function must be explicitly clarified before a health care encounter is conducted. There should be an agreement of some basic rules.

No abstract

This descriptive study, which is based on a PhD research conducted at the University of Zurich and at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, explores the activity of interpreters. At first sight, the interactions between patients and doctors seem to be fluently and smoothly interpreted. Yet, a closer look at the transcripts of the consultations reveals various conversational difficulties. A striking issue in this data set are the patients' complaints about pain and anxieties which do not always reach the doctors or the nurses, because the interpreters cut out affective parts in their renditions. In such cases, the patients' concerns may simply be lost which prevents doctors or nurses from responding on the emotional level. In other situations, however, the doctors or the nurses miss the opportunity to address the patients' feelings, even if the interpreters convey the patients' concerns to them.

It is important that medical professionals and interpreters discuss their roles and expectations before every clinical consultation.

Our paper is based on the Swiss research project ‘Interpreting in Medical Settings: Roles, Requirements and Responsibility’, which was supported by a grant of the Swiss Commission for Technology and Innovation (KTI) and carried out by an interdisciplinary team comprising medical specialists from the University Hospital of Basel (Marina Sleptsova and colleagues) and interpreting studies/applied linguistics researchers from the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) (Gertrud Hofer and colleagues). It explores videotape transcriptions of 12 authentic interpreted conversations between German speaking doctors/medical staff and patients of Turkish or Albanian origin. The analysis finds that culture-specific expressions produced by the patients occur rarely and do not pose any interpreting problems. By contrast, phatic tokens and hedges play an important role in medical personnel’s presentation of their interactional, trust building, diagnostic and therapeutic intentions. Although these expressions are essential communication elements geared at building patients’ compliance and establishing doctors’ safeguards, they are rarely or inconsistently rendered by the interpreters. It is argued that, while medical interpreters may have plausible reasons not to render these expressions, they would still need to be made aware of the significance of such pragmatic aspects of communication in training courses and/or pre-encounter briefings. More generally, empirical research – similar to that on questioning style and questioning techniques – should focus more on the exploration of discourse markers, meta-discourse comments and rapport-building expressions of different types of utterance and discourse practices in healthcare interpreting settings.